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AWS EC2Backuper tool

If you are used to AWS EC2 service, then you probably have noticed that there is no integrated, global (i mean that targets a lot of instances at the same time) and « schedulable » way to plan servers auto-backups and retention strategy.

Many corporates have made business around this providing tools and cloud service to achieve this. I was asked during one of AfricaSys customers’ production migration from vSphere inhouse datacenter to AWS (RDS, EC2 mainly).

After planning this, realizing the VPC architecture on AWS and successfully migrating instances to AWS Cloud and databases to RDS: one thing remain: build the same vSphere auto-backup & retention strategy for theirs critical servers on AWS EC2.

I decided to wrote our own tool because:

that was fun🙂

and through this i was looking for a global, nice, transparent way to achieve auto-backup and retention plan (not one of those suggestion to use CLI a loop on some volumeId list to backup)….

Here come EC2Backuper. The principal is simple:

you put a « backup » tag on your critical instances

you schedule by cron (shell and bat scripts are provided) the launcher which takes in argument

an AWS account credentials

the retention days number (all backup older than this number of days will be deleted)

the region were are the instance your are targeting (by default its is EU_WEST_1 : Ireland)

TIPS:

the tool can be run in TEST MODE: it will debug everything by realize nothing on the infrastructure (no creation, no deletion)

providing -1 as retention days number, the tool will clean all your existing backups